


A Small Dark Light

by pythia



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, F/M, Pining, SPOILERS for TLJ, forcetime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-18 15:00:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13684044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pythia/pseuds/pythia
Summary: For the first time, someone had bothered to say goodbye. Rey saw the small, dark light inside of Kylo Ren that even escaped the great Luke Skywalker. Goodbye just wasn’t an option for him.





	A Small Dark Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spokane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spokane/gifts).



> Thank you to everyone who beta read and listened to me panic while writing this.
> 
>  
> 
> _"Taoists gain their ends without the use of means. That is indeed a light that does not shine—an idea that must be pondered and brooded over. A small dark light."_ Ursula K. Le Guin

His life was divided into two parts—Before Rey and After Rey. Before Rey had come into his life, Kylo Ren’s life had been about Snoke. He was the voice in young Ben Solo’s head and the force that shaped him into the man Kylo Ren. Instead of feeling lost without Snoke reaching out to him through the Force, Kylo felt peace. Rey shone brightly, even when they were not connected and seeing each other from light years away.

Shutting the door of the Millennium Falcon was a slap in the face.  As a child, Kylo had seen his father disappear through the same doorway without a backward glance. He often thought that he could better identify Han Solo from the back, given the number of times that the man had walked away from his family.  

For the first time, someone had bothered to say goodbye. Rey saw the small, dark light inside of Kylo Ren that even escaped the great Luke Skywalker. Goodbye just wasn’t an option for him.

Reaching out across the universe, Kylo brushed a fingertip of power against the presence in the Force that felt so much like Rey. In the years that he’d been estranged from Skywalker and Leia Organa, Kylo had never bothered to reach out to feel them in the Force. He could tell that they were both alive, but their location was entirely unclear. It was like a bad comm channel, with their presence flickering intermittently. Snoke had said that reaching out across the universe through just the Force was a nearly impossible feat, one that would claim the life of even the most powerful Jedi or Sith.

Yet, Kylo Ren did it easily. He reached out Rey countless times, marveling that she felt like how the stars looked at night in bright cities. She sparkled and flickered with life, unlike the bright hum of the lumen globes that lit the cities Kylo had visited over the years.

He reached out once, twice, five times, eight times and twenty times until Kylo lost count. It became a strange habit, like pressing a painful cut on the inside of his mouth. He reached out, felt nothing in response and welcomed the accompanying sting.

It’s like when he had been hurt training or out on a mission. Pressing careful fingers against cracked ribs and bruised flesh. Cataloging each injury, asking himself, “Does it still hurt? Has this wound healed? Touch it. Find out.”

Then, Rey responded.

“Five thousand times. You’ve reached out to me five thousand times.”

Startled, Kylo broke the connection without a word.  

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re intense?”

Rey appeared in the dark corner of Kylo’s bedroom shortly after attempt number five thousand ended so abruptly. She wasn’t quite smiling, with dark circles under her eyes and hair pulled back into a tight queue.

Kylo sighed, pushing back from the small table he was seated at with a datapad and a mug of rapidly cooling caf. He schooled his face into a passive expression, one that hopefully didn’t show how rapidly his heart was beating.

“I can feel your heartbeat, but it’s your eyes that betray you, Ben. I know that’s why you had to wear the mask. Your eyes betray you.” Rey’s voice was cool and distant, but the smile that lingered at the corners of her mouth betrayed her, as did the softness in her eyes.

“It’s your actions that betrayed me,” Kylo snapped, uncertain and suddenly shy of Rey. He’d reached out five thousand times. Rey had kept count every time that she felt him. Kylo tortured himself attempting to unpack the significance of Rey keeping track of each attempt that he made to reach out to her. So many times he imagined her inside of the battered and dirty cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, ignoring each invisible tug of the strange Force connection between them.

It felt so much like fate, but it wasn’t fate. There was no such thing as fate. Only the Force.

He instantly regretted snapping at her. It was the exact wrong thing to do or say, which meant that it was Kylo’s first instinct. Even with a new name, he was still a Solo.

“Five thousand times. What were you trying to accomplish?” Rey walked closer, her feet padding on the Ebonite tiles of his small stateroom. Unlike Snoke, Supreme Leader Ren eschewed the finer things in life. Whispers in the corridors said, “ _He was raised as a Jedi, like a monk. Kylo Ren came to Supreme Leader Snoke with only the clothes on his back and a lightsaber."_

“I don’t know. It just became… a habit, I suppose,” Kylo replied, looking down at his datapad. After all this time, now that he had Rey’s attention, what did he actually want? They were still connected but separated by so much more than just a galaxy.

“Training is a habit. Meditation is a habit. This isn’t a habit Ben. What do you want from me?” Rey rubbed the back of her neck. The smile had disappeared along with the softness in her eyes.

“I don’t know. Why did you respond?” Kylo looked up from his datapad, the invisible tether that connected him to Rey hummed with feelings of frustration and hope. He’d never felt her feelings through their bond. Kylo had often lashed out with foul, black bouts of rage as a child. Those feelings he now knew stemmed from Snoke, brushing against him in the Force. Feeling Rey’s confusion and hope was strange, like accidentally slipping on someone else’s coat that was still warm with their body heat, invisible but real traces of their presence.

“Impulse, I suppose,” Rey frowned at Kylo, “Are you sitting? You seem shorter than I remembered. I thought you were a bit over two meters tall. That’s what I told Rose, anyway.” Rey’s face fell and her cheeks colored with embarrassment.

“I am sitting, but who is Rose?” Kylo kept his eyes trained on Rey. She seemed more embarrassed than the time she’d found him without a shirt on.

“She’s my friend. She wanted to know what the Supreme Leader was like. I told her that you were, you know, tall. Because you are tall. When you’re standing,” Rey waved a hand dismissively at Kylo, as if she could make him disappear with a gesture. Her determined expression and obvious self-consciousness made Kylo chuckle. The first laugh, big or small that he’d had in awhile.

“I am tall,” Kylo agreed, his voice unable to disguise his mirth. Five thousand attempts and they were discussing how tall he was. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted, but it wasn’t like he knew what he was expecting, anyway, so this wasn’t entirely too terrible.

“I have to go.” Rey’s voice was tense as if someone had walked into the room that she was in unexpectedly. Kylo was reminded of Luke Skywalker’s entrance of exploding stone at the very moment with their hands touched. For just a moment, Kylo saw Rey standing by his side, fighting with him against Snoke. Their backs pressed together as they fought off the ring of Praetorians that closed ranks around them. If that had come true if Rey’s parents were really sad drunks that sold their toddler for drinking money, could the rest be real? The other things that he saw them do?

What could have transpired if it hadn’t been for Luke Skywalker?

“Goodbye Rey.” Kylo’s throat felt tight as she disappeared, leaving only a dark empty space where she had just been standing.

Kylo rolled over in the dark to see Rey, seated somewhere near the door to his ‘fresher. Her head was bowed, the trio of dark buns that were arranged along the back of  Rey’s head looked like the ridges on a strange carapace.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” Rey’s voice was small and tired. She looked up and the circles under her eyes were like bruises. Had someone hit her in the nose? Kylo recalled when he’d gotten hit with a training saber when he was seventeen, breaking his nose and making twin bruises blossom under his eyes.

“It’s okay. I wasn’t really asleep. Just resting my eyes.” Kylo sat up and realized belatedly that he had gone to sleep without putting on a shirt. He shivered, chilled by the cool air circulating through the Supremacy and by how close Rey was to him. If he wanted to, Kylo could reach out and touch her knee.

Rey’s breath came out in a rattle, it was a sound that he hadn’t heard since childhood. The hitch in her breathing… She was crying. Very softly, but she was definitely crying. No one had cried in front of him in years. Kylo hadn’t cried since Crait. The silent tear that had slipped down his cheek when the hatch on the Falcon closed.

“Rey?” Kylo kept his voice soft and even, the sort of tone that Ben Solo used when correcting a younger padawan’s stance when trying shii-cho for the first time. Kylo Ren didn’t know that he could still be that gentle and soft.

“Will you come? Please?” Rey’s breathing hitched again before she looked up at him, her eyes dark with unshed tears.

“Where do you want me to go, Rey?” Kylo felt Rey’s fear and sadness. It was a mirror to his own.

“I don’t know. Do you really want to be Supreme Leader, Ben? Do you want this?” Rey looked at him for a long moment before looking away and wiping her eyes.

Five thousand times. She’d kept track of every attempt.

Kylo shrugged. “I don’t know. No one has ever really asked me what I’ve wanted. Or who I want to be.” He looked away as his chest tightened and Kylo’s breathing became more labored, his eyes grainy with lack of sleep.

“Come to Nar Shaddaa, if you want. I’ll be there in two standard days. When you get close, I’ll find you.” Rey’s smile was watery and sad, but it somehow made Kylo feel lighter.

“Two days,” Kylo agreed with a nod, and then Rey was gone.

Did he want to be Supreme Leader? Or did he want the things that he’d seen with Rey? The feelings and possibilities that danced just outside of Kylo’s reach. For all of his power as Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren could not make those possibilities real without Rey.

Two standard days later, Kylo had managed to extricate himself from his duties as Supreme Leader and slip off to Nar Shaddaa. It was a shithole planet. Jakku was the backend of nowhere, a place where people went to be forgotten. Nar Shaddaa was much the same, only brightly lit with garishly colored lumen globes offering every kind of distraction from the universe. It was another place to go when someone wanted to be forgotten. It was curious that Rey, of all people, wanted to meet on Nar Shaddaa. She had to know that Kylo Ren could never forget her, even if he had wanted such a terrible thing.

Rey had rented a greasy-smelling room above a noodle shop and next to some sort of brothel whose patrons or employees made the Force into a chaotic, painful web to traverse. As they stomped up the creaky, dirty stairs, it occurred to Kylo that this could actually be a trap. He’d just blindly trusted Rey not to throw him in prison or put a blaster bolt between his eyes. That was the sort of person Kylo Ren had been. It was the sort of person Han Solo had been before Leia Organa.

Rey was never that kind of person.

When she’d come to him on the Supremacy, Kylo had thrown her at Snoke’s mercy, bound in handcuffs with no plans on how to get them out of the situation. His impulse to kill the Supreme Leader and free Rey had been made in a moment. The universe was unimaginable without her. It was the sort of plan that would have appealed to Han Solo. Kylo wasn’t impulsive or irrational. It was only when the Jedi and the damn Skywalker family were involved that Kylo Ren found himself completely unable to think clearly. He swelled with emotions so conflicting and violent that only shouting or destruction seemed to properly bleed them out of his soul.

Before Rey, people had feared Kylo Ren as an unknowable, unfeeling force of ruin and destruction. After Rey, they knew that he was a man. They had seen him give into passionate rage and fear on Crait.

It didn’t feel like a weakness, not as Skywalker or Snoke had taught him. Those were moments in which Kylo wanted to stop everything and go back to when he was just twenty-three, asleep in his hut on Naboo. Those moments defined all of the things that Kylo Ren did not want, even if he could not begin to decide what he wanted.

He wanted everything and nothing at all.

The room was tiny and dirty. It looked like someone had instituted a mold and mildew breeding program in the ‘fresher. The bedding was mostly clean, and he gingerly sat down on the bed next to Rey, who leaned against the yellowed wall like she wasn’t staying in the dirtiest room in Nar Shaddaa.

Now that they were together, Kylo didn’t know what to say. It was the same feeling that made him break the connection with Rey when she finally responded to him.  After four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine attempts, he still didn’t know what he wanted to say.

Instead of feeling claustrophobic or otherwise awkward, Kylo felt entirely relaxed with Rey. The Force hummed between them, a feeling of harmony that had suffused them both when they’d touched hands and fought together against the Praetorians.

Minutes ticked by and Rey didn’t speak. Neither did Kylo. It seemed that they were beyond words at the moment. They’d said it all before on the Supremacy. Nothing had really changed, except for the thousands of attempts that Kylo had made to reach Rey.

Why were they here? Why had she responded? Why had Kylo even tried? There were only questions and no actual answers. Kylo was reminded of a tutor he’d read about that taught only by asking questions of his students, until they questioned the nature of everything in the universe. There was nothing more terrifying than that sort of moment when the entire universe upended itself and quaked until nothing was in the proper order. Nothing was left intact.

He considered the bright flare of a green lightsaber against the dark sky of Naboo during the early summer.

Finally, Rey reached out and laced her fingers through Kylo’s. It was the first time that anyone had touched him since the Supremacy. Supreme Leaders were untouchable. Unfathomable. Unknowable.

“You’re Ben right now. You’re not the Supreme Leader,” Rey whispered softly as she closed her eyes deeply and reached out to Ben.

Images flooded Kylo’s mind. It was overwhelming and painful. His breathing became labored as each image came into focus. Rey’s useless parents, her childhood on Jakku, and then there was a flash of her holding a tiny girl with large ears that stuck out like the handles on an amphora.

Kylo gasped and tore his hand away from Rey. Those ears. He knew them well. Their eyes met for a long moment before he was able to properly speak. Breaking something, screaming, or fighting someone felt like the wrong ways to ease the torrent jumbled feelings that he was experiencing.

“What is this? What did you show me? Is this some Jedi trick?” Kylo’s voice cracked, and his chest heaved as if he’d been training for hours. His ears. Rey’s hazel eyes.

“It’s what I saw when we touched hands when I was on Ahch-To. There’s more, but I wanted you to see the future… the shape of what I saw. I tried to tell you in the elevator, but I didn’t know how.” Rey’s voice was small but didn’t waver. She looked up at him, firm and sure of herself.

“A child?” Kylo’s voice broke, and he was stunned. Children were wholly alien to him since joining with Snoke and the First Order. The first child that he’d seen in almost a decade was in Tuanul, just before ordering the entire village to be executed.

Monsters couldn’t have children. Monsters shouldn’t have children. That meant the things that he’d seen and felt before would happen. He’d seen a child with a mother that looked strikingly like Rey. Kylo assumed it was Rey’s mother before whatever vices had claimed her beauty and interest in anything that wasn’t drinking.

A child. Their child. His child with Rey.

Rey looked at Kylo and sighed. “I don’t know how it happens. I mean, I know how it happens, but I don’t know how we exactly…” Rey gestured helplessly at the space between them, reluctant to admit that, at some point in the future, they’d copulate and there would be a daughter. They would have a daughter together.

He looked away, not considering that possibility while in a cramped, dirty room in Nar Shaddaa. Now that it was presented, Kylo’s mind could not ignore it, a Dewback lurking in the room.

“I suppose that we’ll have to figure that part out together.” Kylo’s voice was soft and tremulous. It was a sound that was so afraid and fragile, yet he didn’t wish for the safety of his helmet or vocoder.

“Together?” Rey asked, her eyes dark with something that was too close to desire for Kylo's comfort.

“Together.”

Rey nodded slowly, her hair falling into her eyes, “What about everything else?”

“It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.” He shifted uncomfortably, trying not to look at Rey. They would have a child. How they’d get there from awkward conversations across light years was anyone’s best guess. Kylo Ren knew the broad strokes of how it might happen, but he lacked the experience entirely.

They lapsed into silence and Rey rested her head on his shoulder. The noise and chaos of Nar Shaddaa quieted around them as they both reached out to the Force to see what exactly came next.

Kylo Ren no longer wanted nothing and everything, all at once; It wasn’t simply Before Rey or After Rey. He wanted a future, one he made for himself and he let himself fall to it, finding answers with her.

  
  
  



End file.
